Sunday column: Cruelty charge follows failure to euthanize

Here’s a piece of the Advocate column from Sunday’s newspaper. (This, I can assure you, was a tricky and gut-wrenching one to write.) Click here to read the full story. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Is Gerard Sagliocca being charged with animal cruelty for refusing to euthanize a cat?

That’s a question raised by an unusual case pitting the Guilderland homeowner against a prominent veterinarian from Voorheesville.

The conflict dates back to spring of last year, when Guilderland’s animal control officer captured a cat named Charmer and took him to Holly Cheever, a vet who quickly diagnosed the suffering animal with acute diabetes. Cheever recommended euthanasia for Charmer, and the cat’s owners — Sagliocca and his sister — agreed to put him down.

Fast forward to last November, when Sagliocca (photo right) and his sister returned to Cheever with a cat they had adopted months earlier. Charmer II, as the cat was known, had been born with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus and, in Cheever’s opinion, the cat had been allowed to degenerate to the point of misery.

“It was dying cell by cell by cell,” Cheever told me, noting that the cat’s FIV had led to liver cancer. “The only humane course of action was to euthanize.”

But Sagliocca refused Cheever’s recommendation. He and his sister took the cat home. Cheever, in turn, called Guilderland police, who arrived at Sagliocca’s duplex, retrieved the cat and returned it to the vet’s office.

There, Charmer II was put to sleep.

An interesting corollary to this story, I think, is the divide between animal lover who seek to keep their animals alive at all costs, and those, like Cheever, who think doing so unnecessary prolongs animal suffering. “These kind of slow, long deaths just do not happen in a wild animal,” Cheever said. “Because we provide them with food, shelter and warmth, we prolong their suffering.”